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Seagate's Longmont facility set to add 150 employees by year's end

New hires will be mostly engineers, company says

By Tony KindelspireLongmont Times-Call

Posted:
04/18/2013 11:57:23 AM MDT

Updated:
04/18/2013 03:43:23 PM MDT

Seagate's Colorado design center in Longmont opened in December 2000. The company is the Longmont area's largest private sector employer with about 1,250 workers, and it plans to add another 150 by year's end. (Lewis Geyer/Times-Call file)

Longmont's largest private-sector employer is about to get even larger: Seagate is hiring.

The company is holding a job fair May 9 to search for candidates for the approximately 150 jobs it plans to open at its Colorado design center in Longmont. The new positions will be mostly in engineering and other technical fields, according to the company. The jobs will go to support Seagate's efforts in the hard disk and solid state hybrid drive markets, it said.

The Longmont facility currently employs about 1,250 people and is one of two Seagate design centers in the U.S. The other is in Minnesota. The company also has a center in Singapore and another in Korea, which it picked up when it bought the hard disk drive business of Samsung in late 2011. The Longmont site is the largest of the company's design centers.

"This is the largest recruiting campaign we've held in probably a decade," Jeff Mason, the company's vice president of product development at the Longmont facility, said in a press release. "Since our last major hiring effort, the digital world has grown exponentially, thanks to cloud computing, mobile devices and more. As a result, we're applying new technology to a host of consumer and data center applications."

The company's jobs have a significant impact on the local economy. Software engineers in Boulder County draw an average annual salary of about $90,000, according to the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment.

Seagate opened its Longmont facility in 2000, consolidating nine much smaller facilities scattered around Longmont it had been in.

In its most recent earnings report, Seagate (Nasdaq: STX) reported revenues of $7.4 billion for the first half of the current fiscal year and net income of $1.07 billion. For the same period the previous fiscal year the company had revenue of $6 billion and net income of $703 million. With its acquisition of Samsung's hard drive business and Western Digital's buyout of Hitachi Global Storage Technology -- now called Viviti Technologies -- Seagate and Western Digital are the two major players left in the hard disk drive business.

Globally, Seagate, which is headquartered in Cupertino, Calif., employs more than 55,000 and operates in more than a dozen countries.

A worker tests prototype hard disk drive parts inside a clean room at Seagate's Longmont facility. The company has announced plans to hire 150 new people by year's end, and is holding a job fair May 9. (Times-Call file photo)

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